<< <<NEVADA100% of national average. CALIFORNIA101% of national average. Those rankings of total state and local tax burdens seems out of whack to me>>

Sources are Federation of Tax Administrators (D.C.) and Center for the Study of the States (Albany) as cited on CNBC.com >>

People often overlook the fact that governments have only one way to finance themselves: taxes. SOMEONE is going to pay. I suspect the major payers in Nevada are gamblers, who provide enough gaming tax revenue that the state can have low property and sales taxes and no income tax. As someone mentioned in another post, Alaska gets significant revenue from oil removal taxes.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about PA, what's important from a tax perspective is to determine how the tax structure will affect YOU. You do that by learning their rules. Links to the state taxing authorities are avialble from the IRS website, http://www.irs.gov and, I believe, from the FTA website: http://www.fta.org.